by R J Theodore
But she had an audience. Everything that happened here would be talked about after people left. And Patron Demir probably didn’t want his name remembered as the man who scolded the Empress and sent her back to bed.
He finally bowed, stiffly, and no more deeply than was strictly polite. Then he invited the alien representative to one side of the hall, a distance away, with an extended arm.
Uncle shifted beside her, and Emeranth turned her head the merest fraction to one side, not enough to see his face, and leaned toward him as she’d seen her parents do when an advisor had something to say. She knew what it looked like to be a ruler. It was the decisions that made her worry this would not work.
But it had to. Emeranth was supposed to be in charge.
“Unc—Lord Hankirk.”
His voice sounded close by her ear. “Brilliantly done, Your Grace. But Patron Demir will not forget this. I advise caution.”
“I—We do not want that Patron Demir should forget this. Do you have counsel for Us, Lord Hankirk? My late parents’—Winds See Them Home—cabinet appears to have been removed. We require your assistance in selecting new advisors. You can imagine We would want to install people We can trust.”
Uncle chuckled. “That’s my girl.” Then he caught himself and cleared his throat softly as though it could erase the familiarity.
Emeranth desperately wished she could encourage Uncle to be as casual with her as he once had been. She needed a friend, but her court had to see him held at the same arm’s length as everyone else. She had to be objective, and wise, and she had to do it all on her own.
“Unfortunately, Your Grace, there is no one you can trust to be loyal to your crown.”
Her stomach hurt at the thought. “Then what would you suggest?”
“Select advisors who command the loyalties of others who you need.”
“Ingratiate them to Us by elevating them, you mean.”
“If they will gain what they want by following you, they may be less inclined to follow those who might oppose you.”
“The Patron and his Yu’Nyun allies.”
There was a silence. “Just so, Your Highness.”
“Who controls the servicemen? The shipping industry? The water trawlers?”
“Well done, little—Your Grace.” Another self-conscious movement. Uncle was having as hard a time adjusting to the language of the throne as Emeranth was, but she felt warm with pride to hear the approval in his voice. “I will introduce them to you this evening.”
She nodded. “We are most grateful for your help, Lord Hankirk.”
Then she straightened her head and corrected for a slight sagging of her spine. Lifted her chin and addressed the court. “We will accept solicitations now. Please proceed.”
After a moment’s nervous hesitation, where all the grown-ups in the court looked at each other, eyebrows up and mouths pulled into thin, nervous smiles, someone moved to the supplicants’ door and showed in the first person who had come to beg the court for help.
Across hours, Emeranth reminded herself over and over again that she was in charge. Luckily, the people who came to court for help mostly had small concerns. Things she knew the proper responses for after years of hearing her parents perform the same obligation, and from the economics and legal lessons Catkin had led her through. Loans given, food handed out, decisions over who had rights to what halves of things. Very rarely Uncle make a slight shift in his position so that she would understand a decision was more delicate than it might seem, and she allowed him to whisper counsel in her ear again. No one else in the court attempted to correct her, though twice, Patron Demir coughed or cleared his throat in a very corrective tone, and Uncle would explain his motives to her. She never did what Demir wanted even if Uncle said that, for other reasons, it was the better long-term choice. Like when a Breaker woman wanted the same help that a Cutter family had received and both Demir and Uncle seemed to think she should be sent away, Emeranth gave her twice as much. Other non-Cutter solicitors had probably been turned away while she was sulking in her rooms, and she wanted to make it right. She also wanted to send Patron Demir and the well-dressed Yu’Nyun away but knew she couldn’t do that in front of everyone unless they showed open contempt.
Other matters of the court seemed suspended as everyone watched her. There should have been other concerns brought to her attention, in between the audiences she granted to the people of Peridot, but no one spoke. It was as if she were a performance that everyone couldn’t take their focus off.
She wished she could stop. Give in and run back to her rooms and hide under her blanket. But this was important. She had to stay here for as long as she could. And show no fear or remorse.
And she had to get up again and do it tomorrow. And the next day.
And she would.
Chapter 6
Tisker, always the thief, had been watching the figures in their budget and hoarding part of his tips in a secret stash for months.
As they pushed into the room, Sophie was leaning over a long thin strip of paper at the center table, marking notes in Yu’keem characters next to a pencil sketch. There was a partially assembled machine laying in front of her, reduced to a pile of gears, ratchets, and pins. She looked up, her face brightening beneath a dark smudge on one cheek and across that side of her nose.
Talis caught sight of an angry red splotch on her left forearm. “Sophie, what happened?”
Sophie followed the line of her focus to the burn. “Oh, it’s not a big deal. I was helping Kirna, and a little bit of something spilled on me. She already treated it, and it looks way better than it did earlier.”
More alchemy. “I appreciate everything Kirna has done for us—the clothes and everything she’s sent home—but I don’t like the idea that you got a wound that looks worse than that. We’re going to need you intact for this plan, Soph. Tell Kirna if she doesn’t want Amos catching her practicing, she’d better get more careful.”
Flexing and rotating the forearm, Sophie tried to hide the pain, but Talis saw the creases around her eyes as the skin pulled along the edges of the burn. “I promise, Captain, she is careful. She knows what she’s doing.”
Talis frowned. “I’ve only got your word on that, weighed against an unnecessary injury that you’re pretending doesn’t hurt. You’re messing about with alchemists; who knows what the next accident might do.”
“Aw, let up, Cap. She said she’s fine.” Tisker stepped between them always eager to dispel tension among their little family. He held the heavy, paper-wrapped parcel aloft. “Order up.”
This wasn’t the gift Tisker had told Talis about, but Sophie bounced once with delight as she accepted the custom-machined part from him. She unwrapped it, carefully laying the metal-dusted paper on the table. She’d been precious with paper while they lived in Lippen. Talis and Tisker exchanged a knowing glance while Sophie cooed over her new part. She caressed the bumps and ridges while Talis swore she could see physics calculations running through the girl’s expression.
“Think it’ll work this time?” Talis cringed as Sophie flinched. She hadn’t meant the question to sound so barbed. “I want to hear that symphony of metal you’ve been composing.”
Sophie relaxed, and hefted the part in her hand. It was big around as a dinner plate, perforated with holes to reduce its weight.
“Balance seems right.” She ran its edge against her palm. “As for the sizing, hard to know until it’s in place.”
Tisker had carried the take-home buckets to their galley counter—a single hot plate atop the sideboard with a dented tin saucepan and a large, flat spoon. “It’ll just take me a moment to reheat this; then we can eat it in two bites, and you can get to work.”
The paper and parts disappeared, fast as a card trick, to make room for dinner preparations. Tisker and Sophie always ate before Dug got back from his shift. T
hey only had the small table and two chairs, and they had work to do with the limited time they could all spend together. In less than an hour, Sophie was due back to help in the library district where Kirna managed an enormous alchemical laboratory for her mentor, Amos.
As Tisker searched in the sideboard’s top drawer for the tin of matches, Sophie peeked under the bucket lid. “Oh, fish! Brilliant.”
“Good thing today’s manager likes me. He saved me the fish, even though lunch was busy. Halfway through the afternoon, they had to switch to roasted cliff grackle.”
Talis made a face while Sophie laughed. Cliff grackles were only about as long as her forearm, including their tail feathers, seemed to have twice as many bones as a bird properly should, and their meat had an odd gamey flavor no seasoning could mask. In Talis’s personal opinion, Tisker brought home roasted cliff grackle far too often.
Sophie grinned in anticipation. Never mind that the scent of fish would take days to fade from the room without the benefit of a window. The variation in their diet was too rare to complain of such things.
Beautifully seared and seasoned, the meal was spooned onto a plate and the crew’s youngest members settled at the table with two forks and tin cups of water. Talis would wait to eat with Dug.
As they shared the dish, Tisker asked Talis about traffic at the docks and pretended not to be disappointed that the cargo ships passing through were less exciting than their meal. She didn’t mention Bill’s absence, not in the mood to talk about it more than once. She had a feeling Tisker suspected, the way his questions skirted the issue.
A dry cough sounded from the corridor outside their room, and Sophie and Tisker each hurried through their last bites and abandoned the table to wipe up their dish and forks. Dug entered, returned their cheerful greetings with a grunt and a nod, and gave a long look to the fish before exiting again to head to the floor’s communal washroom.
They knew better than to engage him in conversation before he had a chance to bathe and gargle. A long shift in the mines left him feeling coated with the fine-grained dust of processed rock, inside and out. A day’s worth of dust, every day, for going on two years. To add to the insult, hot air rushed up the mine shafts from the molten guts of the island. Rakkar physiology was better suited to the environment, designed by Arthel Rak to breathe the acrid air and withstand the oppressive heat, but they were also smart enough to hire someone else for the gritty work. Bone and Breaker laborers mined their precious gems while the Rakkar lapidaries cut and polished the cleaned stones, and the bankers tucked them away into vaults.
Talis had gotten them the best jobs she could arrange with the workers licensing office, and she’d had to be very persistent, irritating the bookkeepers into giving them work licenses, then irritating them further into placing them in the jobs she’d identified. Her at the docks, watching tariffs and fees charged against the ships loading and unloading; Dug in the mines within reach of uncut gems before they were tallied; Tisker in the restaurants where the wealthy gathered to boast of the day’s numbers and share the latest gossip and news; and Sophie as a caretaker and maid in the wealthiest homes and alchemical laboratories, among their jewelry boxes, safes, and rare gadgets. It wasn’t so simple as taking what they wanted and running off with it, though. Getting close to their marks had just been the first step.
Portioning out the plate of food for Dug and herself, Talis scraped the bottom of the pan to collect every last morsel and set the food down just as Dug returned, his wet hair and feathers trailing across his shoulders and halfway down his back. He’d neglected to keep it shaved high on the sides of his head as he once did. They all could use a haircut. But no. Hair ties were cheaper.
Talis sat to eat, minding her toes so as not to kick the bulky metal contraptions under the tablecloth. Sophie and Tisker took their cups and moved to the floor pallets, sitting with their backs against the wall and a neatly folded pile of Sophie’s work uniforms between them. Tisker had been adding hidden pockets into the pleats and seams of her clothes, and straps and buttons to instantly hoist the skirts out of Sophie’s way. He wasn’t as nimble with a needle and thread as he had been before his injuries, but he made up for it by being extremely careful with the stitching, choosing slow and methodical over speed. The pair picked up the sewing where they left off, turning Sophie’s uniform into catacombs of undetectable pockets. Over Dug’s shoulder, Talis could see Sophie’s gaze flick to the plate after each bite, though. Eager to get her devices out and see how that part fit but unwilling to rush their meal.
Talis spun one tine of her fork thoughtfully against her lip. “Dug, if you don’t take that last bite, I don’t think you’re going to survive to leave Heddard Bay with the rest of us.”
Dug raised one eyebrow and glanced behind him, barely turning in his seat. Fork poised over the remaining morsel of dinner. Instead of hurrying, he placed his fork down. “Do you think she would do it? I do not think she would.”
Sophie’s grin returned—that impish slide, heavy on the left. “Got me there. If I want to pull this off, I need all of you. Lousy position to find myself in.”
“Could double-cross.” Tisker put down one skirt and picked up another, feeling his way along the edge for the existing seam.
Making a mock sound of exasperation, Sophie pushed at his shoulder. “Thanks, now they’ll be expecting it.”
Talis started to slouch in her chair, leaning back and enjoying the banter. To anyone outside their crew, the pair would seem to be flirting. Maybe, if Tisker liked women. Or if Sophie liked anyone in that way. The pair had a symbiotic relationship, for sure, but it had nothing romantic at its core. Muscles started to unknot themselves as Talis relaxed. But Sophie pointed a finger at the plate. “Joking aside, Captain, one of you had better finish that. We have planning to do, and I have to go help Kirna clean the starshark tanks before Amos comes in and finds out she hired me.”
“Who’s the captain around here, anyway?” Talis closed her eyes and tilted her head. When she opened them again, Dug was chewing the last bite. He looked content.
Sophie looked triumphant. She leapt to her feet, and the plate was gone before Talis could put her fork down. In mere moments, the table was transformed from dining surface to scheme central.
Most of Sophie’s contraptions were finished. She had already completed the four self-winching grapple cannons with extending articulated braces and a pneumatic auto-torquing lock hammer, and two ends of a vacuum pressure system designed to reroute the bank deposits from the harbor master’s office without detection.
She hefted her pronged electrocancellation barrel from beneath the table and set it centered on top. One panel remained to be snapped into place, awaiting the finishing touches.
Talis lingered, watching Sophie hold up the final part and winding the squared off shaft within to the proper position. The imp looked over her shoulder. “Can I get some room to work here, Captain?”
Chagrined, Talis gave her a step or two of extra room, though she craned her neck farther forward to cover the lost ground. Sophie slid the oddly shaped gear over its end until its teeth connected and interlocked with another row of teeth on a smaller gear piece against the inner mechanism. A pin secured the shaft.
The panel closed, and that was it. Sophie looked like she wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. Couldn’t test it, that was for sure, or they’d blow the whole operation.
An absolute silence settled over the room. For the first time in a long time, it was a silence of contentment. A landmark moment for all their effort.
And Talis had to ruin it. “Bill’s late.”
The words had spewed forth as though she could make them untrue by force-ejecting them. Instead they hung in the air, corroding the crew’s quiet appreciation for Sophie’s accomplishment.
“We wait much longer, we’ll miss our window. The Ignaas and Gant households will be off the table.” Tisker ha
d the schedule memorized, the timetables all but tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. “That’s almost a fifth of the entire take, right there.”
Talis nodded. “I know. Bill knows. He’ll be here.”
Sophie ran a finger over her finished barrel, letting one short fingernail trace the seam where the panel fit snugly into the rest of the chassis. It was months of painstaking effort. Weeks of pay to get that part right.
“Bill is late.” Dug’s tone had none of the finality of Talis’s. It was a statement, a bullet point. A balm on her nerves. “We make ourselves ready so that, whenever he does arrive, we can move.”
“Sophie, how much time have you got?”
The ticking of the enormous clock in the center of the city could be heard everywhere. One only had to still themselves to feel it through the stone floors and walls. Late was not a concept the Rakkar city was familiar with. Perhaps Talis had gotten too used to that over the past two years so that when Bill didn’t arrive the moment she expected him, she began to doubt everything they were putting together.
Nonsense, of course. They’d planned this. And this was her crew. They could steal the clouds from the rain and be gone before it was noticed.
“Good for ten minutes, Captain.”
Talis nodded. Everything would be timed to Ra-Kaz. The inescapable ticking that had, since they arrived in Lippen, made her feel like they were behind schedule would finally make itself useful. “Positions. That great big bastard clock chimes for the evening seventh. Tisker, the annual shareholders’ gala kicks off in the Firespout Lounge.”
“And I’m not working that night. Or I am, really, aren’t I? Residential neighborhoods, with a wallet of keys and as many pockets as a rat has ringworms.”
“That was a visual I didn’t need. Sophie?”
“Evening eighth by Ra-Kaz. Kids will be asleep, so I’m in their parents’ jewelry boxes, skipping the paste and pewter.” She lifted her lock hammer and wiggled her finger over the trigger. “Each house, I time fifteen minutes by the ticking in the walls and cancel the power to their alarms, force their vault lock, pad my knickers with their savings, and get myself to the next household.”
